The Whale Caller

by Zakes Mda

  “You can’t eat that,” she says. “We came all the way so that you can eat good food, not what we eat every day at home.”

  “We don’t eat ravioli every day.”

  “What’s the difference? We eat pasta. Pasta is pasta even if it has bits of mince in its stupid little envelopes.”

  “It is good food to me.”

  “Come here, I’ll teach you good food,” says Saluni, dragging him by the shirtsleeve and stopping at a shelf of smoked oysters in cottonseed oil. “Eat!” she commands, and drags him to a shelf of smoked mussels, and then to white crab meat. For dessert they go to a section that has fudge brownies and peanut butter crunch bars and angel food cakes, all pictured seductively on the boxes.

  By the time they walk out of the supermarket they have satisfied their tastes, now they go back home to satisfy their hunger with macaroni and cheese.

  “I am ravenous,” says Saluni. “I am ready for your macaroni and cheese,”

  “Perhaps we should introduce a new system, Saluni,” suggests the Whale Caller. “We should start with macaroni and cheese first, and then take our eyes to enjoy the supermarket delicacies… with full stomachs.”

  “It sounds like a brilliant idea,” says Saluni doubtfully. “But if our stomachs are full, are we still going to enjoy eating the food with our eyes? Are we still going to salivate?”

  “We can only try,” says the Whale Caller.

  “We can only try,” agrees Saluni. She is pleased that he has finally got into the spirit of the eating ritual, in the same way that she got into the spirit of the dance.

  They walk quietly for some time, and then he mutters to himself: “It beats me who would want to buy canned oysters and mussels when we can have the real stuff, fresh out of the water.”

  “If we have the real stuff right under our noses, why don’t we ever see it on our dinner table?” asks Saluni. “Why do we only see macaroni and cheese?”

  “Because, Saluni, old-age pension money can go only so far. Plus I like macaroni and cheese. It’s as decent a meal as you can get.”

  It’s been more than a month since Sharisha migrated to the southern seas. Autumn still carries smells of warmth. Soon it will be winter, and then the rains will fall. Saluni is an almost fulfilled woman. She no longer has the need to waste her life away in the taverns of Hermanus. She has the Whale Caller now. And she has the Bored Twins. She has the wine too, either from the mansion or from the Whale Caller, who has got around to buying her the occasional bottle of plonk, according to her demands. However, she suspects that though Sharisha has been gone for such a long time, her aura still hovers in the air, especially in the bedroom. Hence her lack of complete fulfilment.

  The Whale Caller continues to sleep in the sleeping bag in the kitchen. But today Saluni is determined that their relationship will be consummated. She will no longer throw hints as she has been doing these past weeks. Hints don’t get through his thick gleaming pate. She will drag him kicking and screaming into bed. And indeed, after taking a bath she gets into bed and calls him to the bedroom.

  “I am tired of your nonsense, man,” she says.

  “And now what have I done?”

  “It’s what you have not done that concerns me.”

  He is mystified.

  “What have I not done?”

  “Tonight I am going to make you cry for your mother,” she threatens.

  The Whale Caller is scandalised. And filled with fear.

  “You do want to cry for your mother, don’t you? I haven’t met a man who wouldn’t want to cry for his mother. Come on, man, you can’t deny me the joy of making you yell for your mother. I am a love child.”

  Such talk makes the Whale Caller very uncomfortable. And very embarrassed. But at the same time it makes him want her. Especially the part about being a love child. He wants nothing more than to make love to a love child. Without further to-do he strips naked and shyly creeps into bed. She shifts against the wall to create more space for him on the single bed. Her body immediately charges him with electric currents. But images of whales interfere at that moment of excitement and he goes limp. Still he manages to convince himself that the whales are blameless, even though he can almost touch them as they float before his closed eyes. The fault for his limpness can only lie with the sweet and mouldy smell, even though tonight it is quite subdued. He tries very hard to obliterate both the smell and the whales from his mind, and focus more on the warmth and the softness of her body. For some time it seems things will work. But at a crucial moment the image of Sharisha appears. His weak manhood becomes even weaker until it dies completely as Sharisha lobtails in the sea of his mind.

  “Is there something wrong with me, man?” asks Saluni.

  “It is not you.”

  “It is that stupid creature, is it not?”

  “At least you no longer call her a fish.”

  “That stupid fish has castrated you.”

  She spits out the word fish as if it were invective. He winces.

  “In any case,” says the Whale Caller, “sex is overrated. I don’t need it. I can live without it. Ever since coming back from my travels around the coast I have lost all appetite for it.”

  “If that is the case, go back to your sleeping bag and have wet dreams about your bloody fish.”

  Even as she says this, she knows that it contradicts her true wishes. However, she does not want his sinewy body to provoke her into utter madness for nothing. He apologetically gathers his clothes from the floor and slinks out of the room.

  She realises that the only way she will ever possess this man and restore his manly functions is to get rid of Sharisha. But how do you get rid of a whale? She closes her eyes tightly and a hazy image of the past emerges. She sees genteel women walking on Cape Town’s promenades wearing long colourful dresses. They are perfectly shaped because of the corsets made from baleen. Some are shading their heads from the sun with umbrellas whose ribs are made of baleen. Down on the rocks by the sea men are fishing and their rods are made of baleen. The beautiful corseted women are bringing them picnic baskets. She looks at them longingly, for if she had lived during their time she would have been one of them. She would be there with the Whale Caller. There would be no Sharisha, for her baleen would have been part of her corset and umbrella. Some of it would have been part of the chair-seats in her beautiful seaside cottage.

  In today’s world, with all the foolish laws that protect these useless creatures, what do you do with a stubborn whale that refuses to let loose your man’s very soul? You cannot just go to any old whale and kick it around and beat it up with your stiletto-heel, shouting that it must leave your man alone. Whales don’t take kindly to that sort of thing.

  She decides to bide her time. In the meanwhile, in the mornings following the nights her body has been raging, she hunts for mating seals on the rocks and sand hills for her own gratification. She sits on a rock and watches them. She finds it titillating that the females can make love to their males only a few weeks after the birth of their babies. Sometimes a couple is mating while another female is giving birth on the rocks, with seagulls waiting to feast on the placenta and the umbilical cord.

  The whale caller sits on the green bench and watches Saluni frolic in the shallows. The wind is blowing her hair in all wild directions. She dances with the wind. She raises her arms and flaps them in some imagined flight. She takes off and soars higher than any bird has soared. She soars to the clouds. Her perpetual coat fails to weigh her down. And then from the clouds she dives back into the water to resume her dance with the wind. The shallows are a perfect place to express her elation. There are no whales to mess up her day and all his attention is on her. She is truly beautiful, he observes, in spite of her ravaged face. He grudgingly admits to himself that indeed the village drunk’s presence at the Wendy house and at the seaside has brightened his life, especially during an off-season like this when the whales have migrated to the southern seas.

  She has no
cares in the world. She does not worry about what the next day will bring. She is a transgressor of all that he holds sacred: moderation, quiet dignity, never raising the voice, avoidance of vulgar vocabulary, never flaunting desires of any kind, frugality. Created in sin, she is such a wonderful sinner. A glorious celebrant of worldliness. He envies her for that. He would like to transgress once in a while… to be as carefree as she is… to be taken over by that wanton spirit! She has often egged him to stop being so stiff and taking himself so seriously. Go out on some hedonistic binge! But his fear is stronger than his desire for pleasure. People were made for different things, he tells himself. Saluni was made to be recklessly happy. He was made to be cautious. And to be patient.

  Whereas she always demands instant gratification of life, he would rather have delayed pleasure, for it carries in it something more solid. Momentary pleasure is flimsy and is for the lightheaded ones such as Saluni. True pleasure must be restrained. Whenever Saluni complains of boredom because she thinks there is no variety in their lives or they don’t have much “fun,” except for the waltz and the window shopping, he answers: “Tomorrow is just as good a day as any. We can still be happy tomorrow. You don’t gormandise pleasure as if there is no tomorrow.” She, on the other hand, suspects he is conserving his energy for the return of the whales… for Sharisha.

  “Don’t just sit there, man! Come fly with me!” she calls out.

  “Those waves don’t look friendly today,” he warns her. “Better be careful.”

  “You are just a coward,” she says. “You don’t want to come and play in the water in case you actually enjoy it and become happy! I have never known anyone so scared of happiness!”

  She stands on a smooth rock that is surrounded by water. She is looking in his direction and doesn’t see the returning tide.

  “Hey, look out!” he shouts.

  But it is too late. The tide sweeps her away. Her eyeballs almost pop out in bewilderment, which leaves the Whale Caller in stitches. She disappears in the waves and then pops up again, raising her hand as if she is waving. He waves back, still laughing. As the waves toss her about she reminds him of a breaching whale. Although she is just a speck compared to the smallest whale that ever visited Hermanus, she begins to assume the demeanour of a playful whale. And this sends him into a further paroxysm of laughter. Until he realises that Saluni is not clowning about. She really is in trouble, wrestling with the waves. And they are getting the better of her. For a while he had forgotten that Saluni was not Sharisha and that not all women are at home in the sea like Sharisha. He kicks off his boots and runs in her direction. He dives into the water. He is still laughing when he swims back to shore with her.

  She is both angry and puzzled as she gasps for air and throws up the salty water. She has never seen him laugh this much. Come to think of it, she has never seen him laugh at all. At best he chuckles. And here he is, having a good laugh at her expense.

  He places her on the sand and takes off her coat. He pumps the water out of her stomach. Thankfully she has not swallowed that much. She vomits bits of the macaroni and cheese that she had for lunch.

  “The damnable coat,” he says as he continues to pump. “It almost killed you.”

  “You don’t like my drinking,” she says between the heaving and the groaning. “You don’t like my coat. What else don’t you like about me?”

  “Your stubbornness,” he says. “You could have died in there. You should have seen yourself. You were quite a sight.”

  “You think this is funny, do you?” she asks, and then a stream of curses—mostly about his mother’s genitalia—escapes her beautiful but chapped lips.

  “I don’t mind if you call me names,” says the Whale Caller. “But you don’t curse a dead woman who never did you any wrong.”

  “And you don’t laugh at a drowning woman who never did you any wrong,” she shouts, spitting out the last morsel in her mouth.

  He cannot help laughing one more time at the memory of her helpless body being tossed by the waves. This infuriates her and she breaks out into another round of colourful profanity.

  “We are being observed all the time, Saluni,” he says, adopting some measure of seriousness. “We must behave appropriately at all times. Garbage must not come from our mouths.”

  “And who is observing us?”

  He is rather vague about this, as if the question has caught him off guard.

  “Perhaps it is your big fish,” suggests Saluni. “You are always dreaming of your big fish.”

  “Whales are not fish!” he moans.

  It is her turn to laugh.

  “The Bible says they are fish so they are fish.”

  “The Bible says no such thing.”

  “It says Jonah was swallowed by a big fish.”

  To steer Saluni away from insulting Sharisha he decides that the person who is watching them is Mr. Yodd.

  “And who is Mr. Yodd? Another one of your whales?”

  “Perhaps it is time I formally introduced you to Mr. Yodd,” says the Whale Caller. “But first we need to get rid of this!”

  He grabs the coat and drags it across the sand. He rolls it into a big ball and throws it into the water. Saluni yells at him as the waves toss it about until it cannot be seen anymore.

  “I want my coat back,” she screams, stamping her feet like a spoilt child. “You go get my coat back!”

  “No, I won’t,” he says, with the firmness of a father talking to a naughty child. “You are more beautiful without that coat. Come with me, I want to show you something.”

  “No, I won’t, not until you give me my coat back.”

  He grabs her arm and drags her along to the Old Harbour and down the crag to Mr. Yodd’s grotto. She is taken by surprise by his firmness, and sulkily she allows herself to be dragged along. He kneels before the grotto, but she refuses to do so. She just stands there and stares at him in defiant mien, her cheeks filled with air like a balloon signalling her anger.

  Hoy, Mr. Yodd. She is Saluni. We are just walking the road together, Mr. Yodd. We do not have a destination. We’ll see how far it takes us. We’ll see where it takes us.

  As they walk up the crag from the grotto he is wondering why Mr. Yodd did not laugh at him this time. He had only listened to his brief confession without any comment. Was it because of the presence of Saluni, who had refused to kneel down? Such confessions are a self-flagellation, and it doesn’t help if Mr. Yodd decided not to humiliate him. He needs his dose of mortification and is disappointed that none was forthcoming from today’s confession.

  Saluni on the other hand is still livid. The water is beginning to evaporate from her clothes and she is shivering from the cold. She wonders why he called her a fellow-traveller without a destination—a slight from the man she regards as the love of her life. What about Sharisha? Does he think he has a destination with Sharisha? She fumes even more when she remembers her coat. She feels naked without her coat.

  This is a new side of him she has not seen before: first the laughter, and then the firmness! There is hope yet. Life will be perfect the day he surprises her with another kind of firmness—where it matters most.

  Strangely she feels as if a burden has been lifted off her shoulders. She feels free. The freedom of the naked!

  Although—ostensibly to get back at him for the coat and the laughter—she ridicules the foolishness of talking to rock rabbits at a nondescript cave, she is curious about the ritual of confession. She is secretly fascinated by the unseen confessor. The Whale Caller professes to hate the rituals she is trying to introduce in his life, yet in his own way he is a creature of ritual. Often she secretly follows him as he goes to confess. He does not know she is there listening. She stands against the wind for she knows he can smell her. Sometimes she doesn’t hear what he tells Mr. Yodd because the wind takes his words in another direction.

  One day she decides to take the plunge and confess. She brings with her oblations of tulips from the mansion. She
arranges them around the mouth of the grotto as she addresses Mr. Yodd.

  Hoy, Mr. Yodd! Harvesting the clouds must be left to those who have big wings. I used to fly, Mr. Yodd. To soar to the highest skies. To live up there in cloudland. Until he brought me back to earth. To walk firmly on the ground. Without staggering. So that the ground knows who I am. The ground needs to respect who I am. Who am I? I am Saluni, and I have taken you over. Maybe not taken you over as such. I just want to have a piece of you too. He does not know it, but I have watched him talk to you. Once he dragged me here and I rubbished the very notion of the confessional. The place, yes, but also the mortifying confessor and the very act of confessing. He does not know that since then I have followed him. I heard him confess all sorts of things about me to you, Mr. Yodd. And about that behemoth he calls Sharisha. In the same breath: me and Sharisha. The eternal triangle: man, woman and whale. I can tell you I am not going to be part of any triangle. The fish must go. Ha! It galls him when I call his whale a fish, so I will call it that until he gets rid of it. I have heard him confess, Mr. Yodd. I said to myself: One day I’ll confess about him to Mr. Yodd too. Then I didn’t know what he gets for his confessions, but I said to myself: If he can confess about me, so can I about him. And here I am, Mr. Yodd, for the first time, kneeling in front of your cave… or grotto, as you prefer it to be called. You know, Mr. Yodd, I have been living with him in his little Wendy house for three months now. I have decided to find rhythm in some of his madness. You are part of that rhythm. That is why I have adopted you. I don’t know what you will do for me, but I have adopted you. I am a lady, Mr. Yodd, and I am beautiful. Why doesn’t he touch me? Why does he turn his back on me? Thanks for the correction: he does not turn his back. It would have been better if he did, for I would still feel his flesh. Why does he insist on wasting his nights in that confounded sleeping bag? Is it because of the light? Some people are fearful of the light. They like to do things in the dark. I, on the other hand, am a child of the light. I am a love child, conceived in the daytime. It had to be daytime because those were stolen moments. The man would have to go back to his wife and the young woman would have to steal back to her parents. I am a child of the day, Mr. Yodd. That is why I am fearful of the dark. That is why I ran away from the Free State farmstead where I was born and spent a lovely carefree childhood. Under the big sky the nights poured themselves on me, and drenched me with darkness. Darkness suffocates me. But it was not only from darkness that I was escaping. I am an exile from thunder. I walked from the Free State through the Karoo because our summer rains over there are accompanied by thunder and lightning. I was fearful of thunder. I had heard that the Western Cape is a place of gentle winter rains. I managed to run away from thunder, but couldn’t escape darkness. Darkness follows day everywhere. Darkness follows me to the end of the earth. I thought I had escaped darkness forever since I knew that there were streetlights in these cities. I remember the freedom I felt when I first came here: with lights in the streets. I could walk from tavern to tavern at all hours of the day and night. But where I lived before I joined him in his Wendy house… they didn’t have such lights. I had to rely on my trusty candle. Oh, so you find this quite hilarious? I have heard of these tricks of yours, Mr. Yodd… the laughter that is intended to mortify. You might as well stop it because it does nothing to me. I refuse to be mortified by you or by anyone else. Instead, your laughter makes me want to laugh back at you, as I am now doing. I do not need the self-flagellation as he does. Mortification will rebound, Mr. Yodd, and hit you between the eyes!